Utopia's Classes
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby
have very particular classless societies in mind.
The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He
is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes
with a burning conviction of his own importance that
he is unwilling to realize through disciplined
labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless
society in which he is at the very top.
Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he
usually was before, but at the very top.
Utopia has a class system. At the top are the
thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans
based on how things ought to be and then turn them
over to lesser men to actually implement. They are
the priestly class of an ideological movement whose
deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.
In a planned economy, they are the titans of
industry and finance, they are the heads of banks
and the men who move millions and billions around
the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job.
But they also make decisions in matters of war and
science. And in all things. They measure political
heresy in all things and all the activities of man
are measured against their dogma and rewarded or
punished.
This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or
Communist China. But take a closer glance at the
White House and see if you don't spot the occasional
similarity.
In the middle of Utopia's class system is the middle
class. This is not the middle class you are familiar
with. There are no small business owners here. No
one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia's
middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked
hive mind of government and non-profits.
At the top of Utopia's class system are the
philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or
rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy
filters them through successive layers, transforming
grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and
each successive layers expands them into further
microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of
regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds
off the other.
Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian.
Instead it has a client class. The client class is
what used to be known as the working class. Utopia
however transforms it into the welfare class.
Clienture transforms the working class into the
welfare class. The destruction of the conditions
under which the working class can exist forces its
members either upward into the bureaucracy, a feat
that is only possible for the younger generation
willing to undergo the educational process, or
downward into the welfare class.
The client class justifies the existence of Utopia's
upper and middle class which are, in theory,
dedicated to public service, to remedying the ills
of an unfair society, which has been made fair by
eliminating all free will and individual choice. But
the client class exists to be subsidized. And its
subsidies justify the subsidizing of the upper and
middle classes of the planners and the bureaucrats.
This is Utopia's crisis.
Its upper class of philosopher kings expect to live
like kings. They want to vacation in Aspen and New
England. They want Bernie's summer home and
Hillary's flat broke houses. And that does not come
cheap. Utopia's middle class expects to live the way
that our middle class does. And yet none of them
actually produce anything. They will, in Obama and
Elizabeth Warren's "You didn't build that" formula,
claim that their public service makes the condition
of productivity possible.
There is one problem with that. Their public service
actually inhibits production. Whatever the rhetoric,
they spend all their days killing the geese that lay
the golden eggs. And then they are insulted when the
goose doesn't recognize their contribution to her
golden egg-laying.
Utopia has a series of interdependent classes that
are subsidized by a productive class that is being
starved out of existence. The inevitable outcome of
such a system is one in which the lower classes are
worked to death to subsidize its betters and the
middle class is robbed by the upper class.
The left thus creates the predatory economic system
it preaches against as a way of life. Its own abuses
are inevitably worse than the system it replaces
because it is not only exploitative, but its
exploitation actively inhibits production.